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Category: Psychology

Categories
Psychiatry Psychology

Membrane

This is a postscript to what I said yesterday.

Mexican intellectuals, whether Jewish or white Iberian, are not the only narcissist intellectuals whose ‘semi-permeable membrane’ prevents them from the most elementary cognitive dissonance (only the media narrative enters their minds, not the bare facts about the Ukrainian war). Europe is also plagued by narcissistic pundits, who are now in a state of great bewilderment due to the start of negotiations between Putin and Trump. Since their membrane allows only positive feedback all they can do, as Alexander Mercouris said yesterday, is to fall into a level of ‘anger, rage, hysteria and panic’. After all, the Americans and the Russians, at last, begin to resume diplomatic relations! (this was never a war between Ukraine and Russia, but between the US-led NATO and Russia).

I reiterate what I said yesterday. Understanding psychosis in the most severe psychiatric cases, even if we are talking about schizophrenia, is fundamental to understanding the membrane of ‘normal’ people.

Categories
Psychology

Arieti

Last month I was talking about some Mexican intellectuals, referring to white gentiles, whose ideology sometimes seems close to the American Woke. Now I would like to say something about another Mexican intellectual, a Jew, about whom I have already said something in The Occidental Observer.

These Mexican Gentiles, and the Mexican Jew, think much the same. That is why a National Socialist of our century must see the Christian problem (or neochristian in the case of these gentile intellectuals) and the Jewish problem as two sections of the same iceberg.

I must confess that in the 1990s, before my awakening, I was a fan of the magazine Vuelta, founded by Octavio Paz, whom I considered then as a kind of mentor. As Paz invited Krauze to direct Vuelta, when I was a normie I didn’t distinguish between Jew and Gentile, so I also became an admirer of Krauze. One of his books, published in 1992, Textos Heréticos, collects very lucid essays, critical of the Mexican leftists. (I now have that book in one of my countless boxes because next month I will be moving house.) Naturally, after discovering the white nationalist intellectuals, and later Savitri Devi, my distancing from both the neochristian Paz and Krauze was total.

However, I recently saw Krauze retweet a couple of silly things about Zelensky (here and here). Like Mexico’s gentile intellectuals, it’s remarkable that Krauze is so blind about what’s going on in the world, specifically Ukraine’s upcoming surrender.

Yesterday I watched an interview on YouTube with a veteran Spanish intellectual, much saner than all these Mexicans. This Spaniard, having listened to what John Mearsheimer and others say about the Ukrainian war, sees the dynamics between states from a sane viewpoint. By contrast, the Mexicans alluded to, Gentile and Jewish, are as narcissistic as my old friend Marco: that poor devil whom I stopped seeing for decades and when I saw him again I found him in a state of narcissistic psychosis (this time I won’t link to the six entries I devoted, on this site, to the ‘Marco case’).

The point is that both a narcissist in a psychotic state and the intellectuals alluded to have something in common. Their mental system of perceiving the world can be understood as a sort of hemi-permeable membrane that only lets in positive feedback. No negative feedback, which would challenge the narcissists’ worldview, enters their minds. That’s why they say such extraordinary things, as linked above in the posts Krauze retweeted.

Of my readers, only Benjamin Power has been interested, as I have, in Silvano Arieti’s book about schizophrenia, which I quote in Day of Wrath. One of Arieti’s sentences that most impressed me was that, by studying specific cases of psychosis (say, like Marco’s), it is possible to understand why non-psychotic people (say, Mexican intellectuals) use identical defence mechanisms. The only difference is that in the case of the psychotic, his madness has already marginalised him from society, which is not the case with those ideological narcissists perfectly adapted to society, even if their worldview is also lunatic.

Midday Update:

Compare the semipermeable membrane of the Mexicans mentioned with the interview with another sane Spaniard that I saw today, Juan Antonio Aguilar.

Categories
Chess Psychology

Indian champion

Yesterday, India’s Gukesh Dommaraju conquered the chess crown from China’s Ding Liren in the World Chess Championship organised by FIDE, a progressive organisation whose motto is Gens una sumus (‘We are one Family’), in the sense that humanity is one. Compare that neochristian nonsense with the motto of this site, Gens alba conservanda est.

As former chess champion Garry Kasparov has commented, both India’s Gukesh and China’s Ding Liren when the latter held the crown should better be called ‘FIDE champions’ because the real champion is still the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, even though officially he is no longer the champion. Carlsen still wins almost every major tournament and has the highest Elo rating in the entire professional chess community. By rating—the real parameter, not FIDE championships—the Aryan Carlsen is still #1 (see e.g., the ratings of the first twenty players in 2024), even though he has refused to participate in the latest FIDE championships for the crown.

FIDE has become politicised. In my day, it would have been unthinkable that a Russian player would have been banned from playing in official FIDE tournaments because of his political views. But in 2022, Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, the player who had come closest to taking the crown from Magnus Carlsen by Carlsen’s own admission, was banned from tournaments for supporting Putin’s military operation in Ukraine. Without that ban, perhaps the World Chess Championship that ended yesterday might have had a white face, Karjakin’s, as he could have challenged Ding Liren for the crown (or in the previous world championship two years ago when Liren beat the Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi).

In other words, the fact that for the first time in history there are no white men in a world championship, only an Indian and a Chinese, could be interpreted as a political decision. In any case, Gukesh’s emotions in the video linked above vindicate what I have said about chess: although it looks like a game of scientists, it is a tremendously emotional game.

Regarding the FIDE championship match that ended yesterday, I would like to say a few words.

It bothers me that several commentators, including some famous chess grandmasters, are saying that Ding Liren’s blunder in his last game with Gukesh is the most serious in the history of the world championships. That is not true! Here are three blunders in the world championships at least as serious as yesterday’s blunder by Liren during a drawish endgame. Those were the days when only those with white skin contested the World Championship crown…

Here we see the position between Mikhail Chigorin and Wilhelm Steinitz, before FIDE existed, for the World Championship in the 23rd game of 1892 (from 1886 to 1894, Steinitz was the first World Chess Champion). There were more than a thousand spectators in the playing hall and everyone was commenting on Chigorin’s brilliant play. Steinitz’s imminent surrender was expected. Suddenly there was a commotion when the Russian, instead of taking the pawn on b7, forgot that his bishop on d6 protected his king from being checkmated and moved it to the b4-square. Steinitz took the pawn on h2 with a check and everyone stood up when they saw Chigorin put his hands on his head. The obvious mistake that an ordinary amateur could easily see cost the Russian master from taking the crown from the champion Steinitz!

A second blunder of the kind that even players like me wouldn’t usually make, but which being human even the best chess players sometimes make because World Chess Championships get on the nerves of both participants, occurred in the 19th game of the 1929 match for the crown between Alexander Alekhine and Efim Bogoljubov in The Hague: a game that started with a Queen’s Gambit. In that endgame any player of my chess level (which is extremely modest compared to the professionals) would have played 70…Ke4 cutting off the white king, and the game would have ended in a draw. Instead, Bogoljubov played 70…Kg4?? and six moves later had to resign.

FIDE was organised after the death of the champion Alekhine in 1946, who had played tournaments sponsored by the Third Reich. In one of the FIDE World Championships when the Soviet school of chess was unbeatable, an error occurred that even a third-rated player could not have committed.

I am referring to the sixth game of the match for the crown between David Bronstein and Mikhail Botvinnik in Moscow in 1951. Bronstein, the twenty-seven-year-old challenger, played the champion Botvinnik, already forty years old. Inexplicably, Bronstein played 57. Kc2? and after 57…Kg3 by Botvinnik, Bronstein had to resign (57. Nd6+ and 58. Nd4 would have prevented the pawn from crowning). That match ended in twelve points for each player (one point for each game won; zero points for each game lost, and half a point for each game drawn) and Bronstein never won the championship title because FIDE had a curious rule. In the event of a twelve-point for each player in a twenty-four game match, the champion, in this case, Botvinnik, would retain his title. We can already imagine the implications of this blunder! But errare humanum est…

Above we see Alekhine (left) against Bogoljubov; a former champion, Emanuel Lasker (seated), and others watching. Compare the elegance of how chess players dressed a century ago and how they dress now. It is perhaps worth saying that, unsuccessfully, Bogoljubov disputed the crown with Alekhine in 1929 and in 1934, when Hitler was on the rise in Europe.

More civilised times, when the Aryan wasn’t yet a self-hater…

Categories
Psychology

CQ in a nutshell

In today’s Aryan collective unconscious, the extremely negative introjects and injunctions from a toxified superego are ultimately due to Christianity.

______ 卐 ______

 
There is jargon above but it can be deciphered after reading the middle part of my Day of Wrath. Ayway, it summarises what we mean when talking about the Christian question.

Categories
Narcissism Psychiatry Psychohistory Psychology

Narcissism, P.S.

I haven’t said the last word in my series on mental disorders in general, and narcissism in particular. I refer to the ‘Marco case’, what I wrote from the end of February to the beginning of this month in six posts (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6). I am not finished with the subject because I am convinced that understanding cases of psychoses of specific people sheds light on the folie en mass that the white man in general is currently suffering from across the West. In this, I resemble the logo used by the late Lloyd deMause, whom I have mentioned on my books and on this site: a globe sitting on the couch of the psychoanalyst.

In my series on narcissism I said that it bothered me that some Jewish psychologists made the important findings whereas, if Uncle Adolf had won the war, those same findings would have been made by Aryans. Today I discovered the channel of YouTuber Richard Grannon, who, like Vaknin, delves into the aetiology of narcissistic disorder although, unlike Vaknin, Grannon looks like an Aryan man.

From this point in his video until before minute nine, Grannon mentions a theme I have touched on in passing: Even though narcissists distort reality astronomically, mental health professionals have been very reluctant to call them psychotic. Grannon doesn’t say why but I say it now.

Academic psychiatry is based on the lie that neuroses have an environmental aetiology for a victim, i.e. a toxic environment and psychotherapy may be useful here; but that psychoses have a biological aetiology and therefore those suffering from this condition have to take their meds. This is the only way Big Pharma can do its multi-billion dollar business (as psychiatrist Peter Breggin has pointed out, the American Psychiatric Association and Big Pharma are business partners—it’s as simple as that!).

But someone who doesn’t buy into the myth that neuroses and psychoses have different aetiologies can better understand not only the various psychoses but realise that in narcissistic disorder the subject is clearly out of touch with reality; i.e. he is psychotic as Grannon tells us in his video linked above. Orthodox psychiatry doesn’t like to acknowledge this because it is known that narcissism has an environmental aetiology (extremely poor mothering), and official psychiatry will never, ever concede that a single psychotic disorder may have an environmental causation. Its collusion with Big Pharma dictates its ideology.

Much of the evil that the West suffers is the same that the common narcissist (or psychotic subject) suffers. The contemporary Westerner has created a false self-image, as can be seen in the highlighted post ‘Myth’, linked to the top of this page in red letters. Just as the psychotic subject is unable to abandon his false self and return to the world of the sane, the common Westerner doesn’t renounce the folie en mass that has been infecting the white man’s mind since World War II.

As I have already said, biography and history are the same, whereas History is simply the galaxy of individual biographies: billions of stars gravitating towards each other.

Categories
Evil Film Psychology

Canaille!

Il y a une autre canaille à laquelle on sacrifie tout, et cette canaille est le peuple. —Voltaire

In my recent articles, and on this site in general, I have expressed myself in a very derogatory way about the masses (and the System that empowers them: democracy), whom I have called as Voltaire called them, canaille, and I have also called them in a much worse way.

After years of not seeing it, I have just watched one more time the 1995 film Indictment: The McMartin Trial, starring James Woods: one of the very few films I can recommend in this dark hour for our civilisation.

The daycare sex abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred mainly during the 1980s and early 1990s and brought charges against completely innocent daycare providers accused of committing various forms of child abuse, including satanic ritual abuse. The McMartin preschool trial was a typical case. Members of the McMartin family, who ran a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were accused of acts of sexual abuse of children in their care.

Since the mid-1990s, the phenomenon has been discredited to such a degree that criminalists and law enforcement authorities have recognised it for what it was: a witch hunt that led to imprisonment and ruined the lives of many innocent adults. The film Indictment: The McMartin trial masterfully shows how a moral panic psychotised the masses in the decade I lived in California.

In its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, similar in some ways to the Salem trial of 1692, such allegations reached grotesque extremes. Using invasive adult techniques in the interrogation of kindergartners, therapists elicited confessions riddled with fantasies: that the children had been kidnapped and taken through a network of hidden tunnels to a cavern beneath the school; that they flew in the air; and that they saw giraffes, lions and the sacrifice of a rabbit to be returned to their unsuspecting parents at the kindergarten. Needless to say, no forensic evidence was found to support such claims, so the final verdict was: not guilty.

After the legal catastrophe that was McMartin and other similar cases (years in prison for this type of accusations before and during the trial with the accused being completely innocent!), children have never again been interrogated with the aggressive techniques that induce them to fantasise so wildly.

Indictment is the best example of how the masses—yes: the canaille—react when they are in a moral panic: they simply trust the Jew-controlled media. The film vindicates why I speak so disparagingly of the masses or rabble and why I can only love the dissident individual.

Categories
Intelligence quotient (IQ) Psychology

On Sam Vaknin

Although I still believe what I said in December in ‘Deep, deep within’ about the Jewish question, today I received a shock when I saw how the Jew Sam Vaknin showed his subversive colours, whom I referred to in recent posts when psychoanalysing Marco in my series on malignant narcissism.

Vaknin is a typical subversive Jew living in the West! In this video I started watching today he says that women will dominate the society of the future because male muscle power is obsolete. He also says that the future of the US will be brown in a hundred years because whites are on their way out; and that both are inexorable processes that only troglodytes rebel against. (Following his perverse logic, I guess Negresses will be in charge of the US of the future!)

So this clinical psychologist is as crazy as the malignant narcissists he psychoanalyses: something very common in the so-called mental health professions—fraudulent professions that I have criticised much on this site. (The racial right has been blind on this issue. What white nationalist knows that psychiatry, psychoanalysis and clinical psychology are pseudo-scientific?) What bothers me most is that Vaknin’s insights into the aetiology of narcissism are valid. But in the video linked above he mixes his valid insights with the monstrosities he says.

For anyone who didn’t get the message, I would like to repeat something I have already said here and in my autobiographical books.

Since the traitorous Western world empowered the Jews after WW2, the greatest findings in depth psychology were not made by Aryans (which would have happened if Hitler had won the war), but by Jews. For example, as far as the abuse of children by their parents is concerned, the greatest breakthrough was to take the side of the child, not the parents or society. And that step was taken by the Swiss-Jewish Alice Miller. In my series on narcissism, I mentioned Silvano Arieti, who unravelled with his treatise the inner world of the schizophrenic. He was an Italian Jew who fled to the United States at the time of the Third Reich. Jeffrey Masson, another Jew, also opened my eyes to the malignity of Freudian psychoanalysis.

What I do in my books on parental child abuse is simply to use the findings of these guys and relocate them from the Aryan POV, which is also possible with Vaknin’s work on malignant narcissism. The difference is that the latter, in the video linked above, seems much more subversive in his message than the other Jews mentioned.

There is nothing wrong with appropriating the findings of Jews as long as we purge them of their subversive messages. However, someone unfamiliar with the JQ will be unable to do so. The work of Kevin MacDonald, for example, is useful for this kind of task. But as long as there is no purely Aryan state, and as Hitler wanted, a Lebensraum where Aryans can flourish unmolested by non-whites, those with the highest IQ, the Jews, will continue to serve as spearheads in various fields where high intellect is required.

The mere fact that in recent centuries Jews have overtaken Whites in IQ should provoke hatred of Christianity since Christianity has for two millennia been dysgenic (unlike the eugenics practised by Ashkenazi Jews). Gaedhal recently quoted me in one of his communiqués recalling my complaint that good Aryan sperm ended up in the asses of convent novices, when it should have ended up in Aryan vaginas, during Christendom. Since the monks were the carriers of good genes as far as IQ is concerned, that was grotesque dysgenesis that whites self-inflicted on themselves out of their paranoid horror of libido we see in, for example, Augustine’s Confessions.

Without Christianity, the Jews would never have won the IQ race against the Greco-Romans in a hypothetical world where Constantine would have been defeated outside Rome.

Categories
Narcissism Psychology

Narcissism, 6

What has Marco’s madness got to do with the West’s dark hour? In short, with their neo-Christian religion of equality of race, gender and sexual identity, the Aryan in general is as crazy as this poor Mexican. In my diary entry of 10 December last year, I wrote:

When I woke up and couldn’t reconcile sleep something came to mind that I had recently heard in an interview of Judge Napolitano with Colonel Douglas Macgregor. All, of course, to contextualise Marco’s psychosis because his madness is the same as the madness of the people in power. Let’s see.

The gringo Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, doesn’t want to see that Russia has won the war in Ukraine but, like Marco, reversed it all. This is what Blinken said: ‘NATO will continue to support Ukraine, assuring that Russia’s war of aggression remains a strategic failure’.

He went on to say that they will not allow anyone to change the borders of Europe (Russia has already changed them), and that Ukraine remains militarily and democratically strong! Blinken added: ‘Ukraine knows that its future is a free, vibrant democracy and its path to NATO and the European Union depends on its own methods’.

This is what I am seeing in a YouTube video. But the video I remember best is the interview with Macgregor. It’s a pity I can’t even locate it. Blinken said there that Ukraine will regain the lost territories, and that they will push Russia back [red emphasis in my diary].

This is pure Marco when he grotesquely deceives himself by telling me ‘the house you are going to occupy’ not giving a rat’s tail about everything I had told him. Marco’s pathology is as undetected by Marco as Anthony’s pathology by Anthony. What Marco does is common even in the highest echelons of power on the planet. There is no difference between the extent of Marco’s psychosis and the extent of the American Secretary of State’s psychosis. It is the same thing.

Macgregor mocked Blinken after Napolitano played him the clip I couldn’t find. The colonel said that, of the points Blinken made, he failed to say that another step is that the Ukrainians will soon develop technology to reach the moon. So, on a par with Marco’s delusions, is the Secretary of State of supposedly the most powerful nation on earth. And so is Biden. The judge, in other videos, has played several clips of Biden saying things very similar to what Blinken has just said.

If there is one thing I have noticed in my writings about the mental disorders of people I know, it is that they are less serious than the disorders of those in Western governments, universities and the media. Nutty Marco only harms himself and his cousin. Crazy elites harm the entire white race.

Categories
Narcissism Psychology

Narcissism, 3

I would not have fully understood Marco without noticing that there were a considerable number of YouTube channels talking about narcissism. But there is a fundamental flaw in all of them. Unlike Silvano Arieti’s treatise which helped me so much to understand serious mental disorders (my summary here), these youtubers don’t illustrate their knowledge with specific cases. Perhaps they do so out of cowardice, as there are quite a few people like Marco in the world. They don’t even have to use real names but pseudonyms, so why they don’t use real-life cases to illustrate their theories is a mystery.

Quite independently of such an obvious flaw, I was impressed that these youtubers say that the malignant narcissist can be distinguished by his or her lack of empathy. As we saw in the previous post, Marco showed me off his cobwebbed house that reminded me of vampire castles without noticing that I watched in horror as the thick layer of dust also covered the armchairs in his living room. In fact, I had to turn over one of the cushions of one of his armchairs so that I could sit in his living room and not get dust on my trousers. To show off his house to me without realising that I was horrified, is to lack the most basic empathy.

Youtubers also talk a lot about the gratuitous rage of narcissists, who explode at the drop of a hat. As we also saw, Marco exploded in anger when the taxi driver and I couldn’t easily find his house without a street number. These youtubers also talk about paranoia, which I witnessed in that September call last year with his claim that his relatives craved to steal his house. Another thing the youtubers say that portrays Marco is that those who suffer from malignant narcissism have fluid contours in their ego, so they treat people as egoic objects. This is so surreal that I must illustrate it with an anecdote.

In the previous entry I had promised to explain why we didn’t meet in a mall last year. The answer is that Marco had told me he would meet me outside a restaurant. However, given the unpunctuality of Mexicans, I have been in the habit of meeting them inside a restaurant on my appointments. This allows me to bring a book and entertain myself if the Mexican in question is unpunctual. I told Mexican Marco a couple of times that I would wait for him inside the restaurant. In a Sam Vaknin video I saw yesterday, he said that the narcissist only registers what you say if it goes along with the narcissist’s narrative. It seems incredible, but even in something as prosaic as the location during an appointment Marco didn’t hear what I said more than once: he heard his original voice that he would look for me outside the restaurant.

The result was that we didn’t meet. It was very frustrating in that, although Mexico City is as large as Houston, with fifteen million more people and far fewer freeways it is very difficult to get around. I chose a Sunday for the appointment at the mall far north of the city because there is not much traffic on Sundays and the taxi driver only made an hour’s drive along a freeway from my house to the mall. Marco had arrived by public transport, so it took him an hour and a half to get to the mall. Counting the return trip for both of us, it was five hours of wasted transport, plus the hour and a half wasted in the mall thinking we had both been stood up. All because Marco didn’t want to register in his mind what I told him: that I would wait for him sitting down, inside the restaurant.

A trivial case you might say, but perfect to explain what it means to treat others as egoic objects: the will of the other guy becomes invisible, and one only deals internally with one’s own will, despite the calamity that Marco had to suffer (Perinorte, the mall referred to, is very notorious because the cell phone signal there is very poor, so we couldn’t communicate when we were in and out of the restaurant). But what causes a ‘narcissism’ that it is not even possible to convey such a simple idea as that we will wait for a friend inside a restaurant?

Thanks to the visit of Marco’s first cousin at my house, who had known him since he was a small child, I tied up some loose ends. I already knew that Marco had been raised by a slightly mentally retarded mother, who apparently had been raped: Marco’s absent father. What I didn’t know, and only learned from what the cousin told me, was that Marco had been raised exclusively by his mother. (Before his visit, I had been left with the idea that an aunt and grandmother, in addition to his mother, had been Marco’s guardian figures; I didn’t know that, from an early age, the mother had migrated from some villages to the capital, where Marco grew up.)

Now that single mothers are in vogue in the West, it is becoming clear what havoc some of them wreak on their offspring, especially boys, who have never had a father figure to attach themselves to. Marco, according to his cousin, suffered an absolute mental breakdown the day his mother died, to the extent that his cousin had to make all the arrangements for her funeral and burial while Marco was mentally blocked. I conjecture that this is when Marco’s depression began, as there was no longer the real source where the mother’s only child could settle accounts.
 

The schizophrenogenic mother

The word schizophrenogenic, which I abbreviate to schizogenic, never appears in the videos of the youtubers who talk about malignant narcissism. It doesn’t even appear in Vaknin’s videos when he openly blames those mothers who undermine the individuation process of their children. I sometimes use the term because it inverts the values of biological psychiatry to the trauma model of mental disorders. (Anyone who has not read what I have written about psychiatry in Daybreak, and still believes that psychiatry is a science, might now read ‘From the Great Confinement to chemical Gulag’ on pages 105-127 of my book.)

Once we reject biological psychiatry and see it for what it is, a pseudo-science, it is easier to see that Vaknin fails by using so many diagnostic categories. I reject not only biological psychiatry, but the hundreds of diagnostic categories of psychiatrists and even clinical psychologists. The reason for this is simple. Even in the videos of Vaknin, who uses a plethora of diagnostic categories, it is clear that sometimes a subject deteriorates from a basically neurotic narcissism into a psychotic one where Vaknin already uses terms like ‘mood disorder’ and even ‘schizoid’. In other words, unlike somatic diseases where a heart condition doesn’t degenerate into a condition of, say, the thighs, in mental disorders everything is very fluid. Contrary to psychiatric claims, neuroses, which even normal people generally suffer from, can degenerate into psychosis (what happened to poor Marco).

What Vaknin does get right in his videos is that the infant internalises the gaze of his mother. When the infant is mistreated by a mother, he cannot say that the mother is bad but blames himself because of a sort of Stockholm syndrome (cf. these pages of my book Day of Wrath). The schizogenic mother, from the fluid contours of her ego, sends her infant an unconscious message: I cannot love you as you are; only when you suppress your individuality, your desires, your will that doesn’t agree with mine and your independence and separation from me. I love you not as a separate entity but as part of me forever, symbiosis, womb: mother and child forever united.

With this engulfing behaviour, the child’s internalised morality begins to turn towards self-denial. The infant seems to internalise a message: To function not only in the family, but in society at large, I mustn’t be myself. Thus the future narcissist begins to be engendered, someone with fluid contours of his ego with the environment. If mother rejects me, it is because I am a bad, spoiled, stupid, ugly child. Some psychologists call this a ‘bad object’ and this object, because it is so bad, has to be expelled. Thus the child projects this bad object, externalises it and turns himself into its antithesis, what some call ‘split’. By projecting it outwards the child purges the bad object from himself, cleanses himself; but at the cost of projecting it onto others.

Marco’s cousin cried when, suffering from paranoia that he and his son wanted to steal his second house, enraged, Marco ran him out of his main house. What the cousin ignores is that Marco has internalised the bad object instilled in him by his mother and now wants to expel it symbolically, by projecting it onto others. What many youtubers call ‘narcissistic abuse’ is nothing more than the unravelling of this long-standing, unresolved dynamic with the real mother.

When a narcissist is confronted with a relative who really loves him or her, like Marco’s first cousin, the narcissist doesn’t know how to cope. It was very stressful for him. Paradoxically, he perceives this love, now really brotherly love (not like the manipulative love of his mother) as manipulation and mistreatment. This sibling love is perceived as dangerous, and the narcissist falls apart and resorts to so-called narcissistic abuse: treating the cousin precisely as he couldn’t treat his biological mother because, as an infant, he was one hundred per cent at her mercy.

But why such a twisted dynamic, in which the grown-up narcissist then tries to act out theatrically with other adults? Because the infant had been conditioned to associate love with betrayal. When the infant, who will become a narcissist, is confronted day by day with this mixture of love and all the negative emotions of the devouring mother—shame, fear, guilt, anger, frustration—he learns to associate love with these negative affects. The abused infant seems to internalise the following: Love is bad, it means that I will be betrayed. Even an eighteen-month-old infant who is treated with this sort of behaviour already feels anger about it. But given the absolute power the mother has over him, he internalises that it is illegitimate to be angry with her. It’s even dangerous. So getting angry with mom must be buried in the mind. But what happens to the infant who buries his emotions?

The anger is internalised as long as it can’t be directed towards mom. The child redirects it to himself. But anger redirected to the internal self, rather than to the original source, transmutes into depression: which is what has happened to Marco since his mother died, with his house so spider-webbed that it reminded me of Nosferatu’s. Just compare what Marco did with his mind with my Hojas susurrantes, the first chapter of which is entitled ‘Letter to mom Medusa’ where I direct the anger outwards, towards the original perpetrators. That’s why I never suffer from depression! In contrast to the vindictive autobiographer, depression is a form of self-directed aggression (see ‘On Depression’, pages 27-41 of my book Daybreak).

And compare also what I do literarily with what Marco advised me: to stop writing my autobiographical books and forget about the past! The very Christian Marco is simply following the accepted wisdom: forgive and forget. But since the unconscious can’t be fooled, look at how my old buddy ended up: mad as a hatter! In other words, not only Christian values must be transvalued as far as Hitler and National Socialism are concerned, but also the Christian ethics of forgiveness, and the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parent whatever she or he does. Marco, who offended me in his last phone call by subtly advising me to join a Christian church went the opposite way and, as Vaknin says in one of his videos, that can lead to schizoid depression: which is exactly what happened to him.

See for example the five minutes from this point in another of his videos, and especially what he says after minute seventeen when he talks about the work with children of Margaret Mahler, who said: ‘Interpersonal relationships become internalised within the ego, or the self’. Mahler also said that what we call the ego or the self is simply a reflection of our relationships with others, and that all mental illnesses are related to interpersonal problems. It is an important video that Vaknin uploaded twice with different titles. And here Vaknin uses a word I’ve used a lot on this site, introject, about which I’ll say a few things in my next post.

Categories
Autobiography Narcissism Psychology

Narcissism, 2

In this article I would only like to talk about the bare facts. The psychological interpretation will come in the next entry.

Almost half a century ago, in 1975, I met Marco on the chess benches in Mexico City’s Parque de las Arboledas, in Colonia Del Valle (cf. my little book on my chess misadventures). Those were times when the teenager I was didn’t want to be in an abusive home and school, but undisturbed by them in a park. The first game we played, by the way, was won by Marco with the black pieces, and I seem to remember that, against my chess habits, I opened the game with the queen pawn and if I remember correctly he replied 1…f5. Apart from the fact that I lost that first game (in subsequent days I would beat him), the only thing I remember is his rather surly face, and we hardly exchanged words before or after playing. In fact, in the 1970s I didn’t get on with him much more than I interacted with other players in the park, although I eventually discovered that Marco was a good reader of literature, especially the great Russian writers.

It was in the first half of the 1980s that I began to get along more with Marco; when, after playing chess or watching some of the other parkgoers play, he and I would walk around the perimeter of the park talking about philosophical issues. Sometimes, taking into account that he worked and I didn’t, he would invite me to lunchtime meals in the proletarian restaurants of Colonia Del Valle or Narvarte (Marco belonged to a different social class), and we would continue our conversations. Eventually I even asked my grandmother to rent him the maid room on the roof of her house, which was near the park.

In short, that was basically my dealings with Marco, whom I stopped seeing when I went to work for a few years in California in 1985. That image, of a friend with whom I could talk to about interesting topics, was the image I had kept of him from those years.

By the time I returned from the United States in 1988, I had lost track of Marco. Since I grew up in Colonia Narvarte, in 2003 I went to live in a guesthouse very close to my beloved childhood and early teenage home. I used to pass by Concepción Béistegui Street, when Marco no longer lived on that street. In late 2004 I saw his aunt coming out of the house where Marco had lived and I asked her about him. She gave me his mobile phone, and I spoke to him. Those were times when Marco worked in the neighbouring Mixcoac and we met only once in that zone on one of his lunch breaks. Since I kept many documents, diaries, and have classified some of my emails to write an autobiography over the decades, I am able to report that from his work office, Marco answered my email on January 7, 2005, and we didn’t see each other again for many years, although I already had his mobile phone in my phone book.

Remembering the old friend from the park, it wasn’t until 2019 that it occurred to me to talk to him again and we arranged to meet outside the Palace of Bellas Artes. We met there on the 27th of May and then went to one of those proletarian restaurants in the centre of the metropolis that Marco likes to eat at. Then we said goodbye. So far, nothing extraordinary had happened, and you can see that my diary entries about Marco were very laconic, in that there was nothing relevant to report. What began to obsess me about Marco’s mind was due to what happened next.

Two years after our relatively brief encounter in the city centre, I phoned him. I was interested in recovering two books of mine that I had given him decades before, including a splendid edition of poems of the Castilian language that my uncle Julio had given me, and a book of the chess champion Alekhine that my father had given me before the tragedy that struck my family.

So, without telling him that my real interest was in the books I wanted to get back, I told him on the phone that I wanted to see his house. With the help of a taxi driver we arrived on 30 May 2021 (remember I have diaries). On entering his house I was astonished at the level of Marco’s neglect by the dusty cobwebs and thick layers of dust throughout his house. I had only seen old cobwebs dusting the door frames in vampire castle movies!

I deduced that the old friend had been suffering from depression for years, if not decades. That had been the same day that Marco had given the taxi driver and me, as a reference point to locate his house, the electricity pylon without realising that there was a row of pylons; and that the real reference point to locate his house was a dumpster. The very rude manner in which he greeted us because we struggled to find his house without a street number was such that I promised myself that this would be the first, and last, time I visited him. Nevertheless, I repressed my anger and handed him the two illustrated books on the Aztecs and the Mayas that I had planned to give him before the trip.

That was the last time I saw Marco. I must say that, when I was dealing with him in the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Marco had never been so rude to me, but what happened afterwards was key to understanding him.

Although we didn’t quarrel (I repressed my anger), since I wasn’t going to visit him a second time at his house, Marco, who surely remembered our philosophical conversations of yesteryear, kept calling me on the phone to visit him again (he didn’t have my mobile number, that I almost never used anyway). My diary records phone calls to my mother’s house on 7 and 28 July, 11 August and 18 December 2021; although he may have spoken at other times. These were times when she would answer the phone and then pass the message on to me. By 2022 Marco gave up phoning to my mom’s place.

In 2023, on 22 May to be exact, remembering his love of literature, I thought of calling Marco to give him, outside his house to which I had promised not to return, a copy of my book Hojas susurrantes (Whispering Leaves). We made an appointment and Marco chose the large mall called Perinorte as the meeting point. It was a disappointment because we didn’t see each other at the Sanborn’s restaurant for reasons of his mental illness, which I will explain in the next entry. But the important thing was what happened next.

Until then I hadn’t had any real problems with Marco. The problems started the next day after our failed meeting. I phoned him to ask him to give me a postal address so that I could send him Whispering Leaves by post, since I was unable to deliver the book to him personally at the mall. With that seemingly innocent phone call on 29 May last year began my morbid curiosity to try to decipher a new Marco I hadn’t known before.

In the phone call to get his postal address, Marco suddenly told me something that stunned me: he wanted to give me his second house, and added that he had an account in the BBV Bank whose funds he wanted to give me as soon as he unfroze them! I was flabbergasted by this, as my friendship with Marco had been relatively superficial; we had never been really close friends. A few months later I learned that he had made the same offer to his first cousin, Marco’s only close human contact with the outside world since he secluded himself in his vampiric castle, so to speak. To offer me money when I knew that Marco, though he has two properties, didn’t have a penny was so grotesque that I wrote in my diary that it was pure blackmail to get his cousin, or me, to visit him. Those were times when I hadn’t yet met his cousin, although I had heard of him.

Then, in that same phone call on 29 May, after those bizarre offers to give me his second house and the funds in his bank, Marco spoke wonders of a train arriving near his house ‘with a broken voice, almost in tears’ says my diary, as if begging me to visit him. I told him that I didn’t want to suffer the hours-long bus odyssey to visit him (Marco and I live at opposite poles of the great metropolis), as I didn’t want to take my car to such a distant zone, and wasn’t going to pay taxis. So, during the same phone call whose only intention on my part was to get his mailing address, Marco had transformed the casual call into a discussion in which he had offered me his house and the phantom money in a bank account. Seeing that I would still not go to visit him by public transport, he scolded me that I was suffering from snobbishness, and that I should open up to a more proletarian lifestyle. Needless to say, I didn’t acquiesce to his demand to visit him despite his fantastic gambit.

The following month, on 9 June, the book I had written reached Marco through the mailman. By 18 July he had read it. He spoke to me and showered me with praise. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever praised what I wrote in Hojas susurrantes so highly. Two days later, my mother died. On August 2, my second book analysing my family, ¿Me ayudarás?, which I had also mailed to him, reached Marco and he sent me his condolences, since I had inscribed a few words on the first page: that I was sending him the book on the very day of my mother’s passing. Then Marco’s cousin contacted me for the first time and we talked on the phone for a while.

By September, the surreal situation with Marco was back. Those were the days when I had arranged with his cousin that I would invite Marco to clear up the bizarre offer that no less than I, whom Marco hadn’t dealt with for four decades, would inherit his second house; and we wanted the three of us to be here. On the 3rd of that month I decided to speak to Marco on the phone to arrange the invitation but he was in a state of extreme paranoia against his cousin. He believed that he and his son, Marco’s nephew, wanted to steal his second house. He forbade me outright to speak to his cousin again, and started saying very nasty things about my siblings. But Marco doesn’t know a single one of them. In fact, he never entered my family’s house. My diary says that Marco spoke badly about my siblings in the context of his demand that I leave the house where I live to go to his second house which, according to his cousin, is unfinished (there’s even a big hole on the roof)!

That is to say, in that September call Marco was angrily demanding that I move out of my late mother’s mansion and into his uninhabited second property, in disrepair. (Just to give you an idea of my mother’s mansion, during yesterday’s move they took out a grand piano and an upright piano that were here as my siblings plan to sell the house, and there is still another piano in the other house, after the garden on the same family property.) Why did Marco surmise that I was getting on so badly with my siblings? To give me fatherly advice; to get me out of this mansion and to invite me to move to his second property in a poor neighbourhood. Marco’s tone was like he was advising me wisely…

I was so alarmed by that crazy phone call that I kept insisting to his cousin that he come to my house to meet me and in October, finally, his cousin and I met at my late mother’s mansion. Since the day Marco had exploded in paranoia that he and his nephew wanted to steal the house he wanted to give me as a gift, Marco and I hadn’t spoken on the phone. But on 8 December last year he phoned me. Unlike the furious paranoid of the September phone call, he began his remarks in a very cordial manner, albeit in an omniscient tone. Yours truly was the object of his ‘wisdom’ in the form of unsolicited advice. The paternal advice was so grotesque, so damaging to my self-esteem and self-image, that it explains why I became obsessed in my diaries with psychoanalysing him. Without arguing with him, because by then I saw him as a disturbed man, I wrote down his words as Marco said over the phone: ‘I want to advise you to stop writing. The house you are going to occupy…’

Marco still didn’t register the fact that I had told him several times that I wasn’t going there, and to boot I had to stop being a writer! He just continued to treat me as an extension of his mind. During that phone call, when I wanted to rebel against the change Marco was proposing (leaving my mother’s comfortable mansion for a house in a poor neighbourhood), at one point in the discussion he said emphatically ‘You’re giving me a lot of crap…!’ (my Spanish-English translation). It was so insulting that I was going to live in his second property, still in structural work, abandoning the mansion where I live, that I let him speak during that last phone call just to record verbatim what he said.

I won’t phone him again. When I met Marco so long ago, he had the same angry character, but he didn’t get out of touch with reality. Now, at his age of seventy-three, I see that he has stepped out of reality. Marco has also wanted his nephews, i.e. his cousin’s children, to live in his second house and set up the restaurant there that Marco couldn’t set up because he squandered all his pension money. But even when his cousin or nephews tell him that they don’t want to move to such a remote neighbourhood, Marco doesn’t come back to his senses. He is under the impression that, sooner or later, someone—for example me—will follow his wise advice.

It’s impossible to convey how perplexed I was when, decades after dealing with him, I came across a new person: a deluded Marco. It was only from the videos I saw on YouTube that I realised that it is fashionable to analyse his symptoms under the curious tag of ‘narcissism’. In this entry I can only add that, unlike those youtubers, who in most cases treated people with this condition because they were romantically involved with them, I cut Marco off from the beginning of his delusions. (Only to loved ones, such as my late sister, have I tolerated her delusions, sometimes directed against me, to the extent that I never broke up with her until she died.)

In the next entry I would like to talk about Sam Vaknin’s interpretation of this kind of psychopathology: not being able to conceive that a close friend, a relative or a partner has a will of his or her own.